Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

  Has anybody tested this air yet? she thought.

  Yes. The AEMs have. It is breathable with no known pathogens. However, the carbon dioxide content is about seven point five percent in the local air. That is high enough that it will start causing headaches and potentially more severe effects after about ten minutes. Breathing the air for more than fifteen minutes at a time will cause blackouts and could possibly be fatal.

  Alright then, start a clock. Dee smiled to herself and popped her faceplate. She hesitated for a moment and then took a deep breath.

  “Doesn’t seem so bad,” she whispered. A clock started ticking in her mindview and a blood gas carbon dioxide measurement in millimeters of mercury showed her real-time toxin level.

  If the CO2 goes above forty millimeters it is time to put the visor down, Bree warned her. You can make it a bit higher but let’s not push it.

  Roger that.

  Dee searched through the front compartments in her suit and opened up the rations kit. She pulled a meal bar out and started to unwrap it, but the gauntlets made that very difficult. If she concentrated and focused her motor controls she could easily unwrap the bar. Hell, she flew a space fighter mecha that had over a hundred levers, buttons, toggles, and switches with the gloves on, she could certainly unwrap a meal bar. But in a breathable atmosphere there was no need. So, she sat the meal bar on her lap and cycled the glove retraction, and the armor peeled back to her wrists, exposing her hands and fingers. A cool chill ran up her spine as the organogel vaporized off her skin. She briefly considered peeling back her helmet and giving her head a good scratching, but she was hungrier than she was stir crazy.

  She cracked the seal on the meal bar and it heated itself to body temperature. She let out a long sigh and then bit into the bar, savoring the sweet and salty flavor of the peanut butter, almond, and granola bits that were mixed throughout the chocolate-covered meal. The bar had been bioengineered to provide a complete day’s worth of calories in the right ratios of macronutrients and yet still tasted good. It also had appetite and hunger pain suppressants mixed in so the solder would have the feeling of being satiated after eating it. Dee continued to chew the bar. As it was, she was hungry enough to eat the ass end out of a bull.

  “Just like momma used to make,” she grunted through a mouthful and then hit the water tube in front of her face in her helmet.

  You know this is dumb, right? Dee thought to her AIC.

  What is dumb, Dee? the AIC asked.

  Me walking all the way to the Maniacs and the groundpounders. That’s what. Dee continued to chew as she carried on the mind conversation. If the aliens don’t know where I am, then I should be doing the recon we came all this way to do. There is some reason the Chiata are not overwhelming my position right now. What is that reason?

  I suspect you are on to something. What would you suggest we do?

  Well, to start with, start tracking any overhead flights and activity. Use audio, IR, UV, RF, multi-spectral, quantum, I don’t know, if the suit has it use it. That’s a start. Let’s see if the alien bastards are going anywhere specific up here. Dee paused for a minute to think. Hell, we have three skyballs. I say we launch them and use them for recon.

  The Chiata might be able to detect and track them, Bree said.

  Yeah, well, they might not, or might not care. Dee finished off the super-dense chocolate peanut butter bar and drank more water, thinking briefly that at least water wasn’t going to be a problem on this planet. It was humid and covered with it. The suit could filter out any pathogens and toxins.

  We could just send them out and bring them back and not transmit the imagery if you are that concerned about it, Bree suggested.

  Yes. Let’s do that to start with. Then we might test the com relay with one of them later if we need to. Dee brought up the shoulder launch tubes and popped open the one holding the skyballs. She increased the pressure in the tube slightly until three small gray balls about the size of ping pong balls popped out and hovered in front of her face. The operator’s window opened in her mindview, telling her that they were ready for instructions.

  How would you like them configured? Bree asked as a pull-down page for each one opened in Dee’s mind.

  Send one along the river southeasterly. Dee thought about the other two for a moment. She reached in through her open visor and rubbed her nose and her eyes as she thought. Send the other two in opposite directions, one east and one west, and do standard reconnaissance sweep patterns. If they get hits on any artificial structures they are to dwell and then collect as much data as possible. Then they fly back to me. Oh, and any signs of the horde they should report back also.

  Understood. No sooner than Bree had said that, the skyballs zoomed out from under the tree and were out of sight. The little camera bots made no noise from their propellantless propulsion drives and left without leaving any trail behind them.

  Keep the sensors on max and as soon as we get any idea of something that needs investigating we’ll head that way. Dee dropped the visor back down over her face and redeployed the gauntlets over her hands. Until then, I’m taking a nap. You’re on sentry duty, Bree.

  Affirmative.

  Chapter 17

  February 19, 2407 AD

  Northern Region

  Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 5:06 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  Colonel Delilah “Jawbone” Strong hit the toggle to transfigure her FM-12 mecha from fighter mode to bot mode. Several of the other Maniacs stood guard and all of the tankheads were ready for action. But, as it appeared so far, as long as her squadron and other soldiers stayed in the canyon basin and within the ruins the Chiata were leaving them alone. The blue force tracker showed that every other drop team across the planet was dead.

  The only other person still alive on the planet other than the Chiata or local fauna was Major Deanna Moore. Delilah had known Ms. Moore since she was a child and in fact had been partly instrumental in rescuing her and her father, who never really needed rescuing because he was such a badass, at the battle of Orlando on the day of Tau Ceti secession in the Separatist war. She had become friends with the Moore family since that time and hated to see Dee shot down and on her own on an alien-infested planet.

  Delilah wanted to get to the Major but for the moment there was nothing she could do to help her. In fact, as far as she could tell, she was just as screwed. She was stuck where she was until somebody came up with a better idea for getting them out of there. Good or bad, the alien forces were above them in overwhelming numbers, but as long as they stayed put there were no blue beams, no red and green blurs, no porcupines, no AA fire, nothing. The aliens simply didn’t attack.

  So, as any good Marine would do, Delilah decided to do something rather than sitting around with her thumbs up her ass waiting for someone else to save her. They were stranded with the ruins. Where there were ruins there were no Chiata. That meant something. What exactly, Delilah had no fucking clue. But she did know that if the Chiata didn’t like it, whatever “it” was she was going to find “it” and use “it” to kill a whole bunch of the red and green blurs and porcupines. She hoped.

  “Alright, Popstar, the two of us will move this thing together once we’re in place.” Delilah told her second in command. They clanked across the large artificial chamber floor tossing small puffs of chalky gray limestone dust with each mecha step. Delilah brought the view of the large granite wall up in her sensor view and scanned it across all frequencies and with active particle scans. Her sensors gave her no reading whatsoever. As far as the mecha’s sensors and computer were concerned there was no wall on the back side of the large cavern. But she could see it. She could touch it. It was there.

  “Jawbone, I’m reading nothing on my sensors. Are we being jammed?” Major Dana “Popstar” Miller said over the pilot’s tac-net. “I can see it with Mark I eyeballs, but nothing else.”

  “Roger that, Popstar. I’ve got
the same thing here. Stay with eyeballs and let’s see if we can find a doorknob.” Delilah wasn’t sure the back end of the cavern was a doorway, but the floor looked like a roadway that rose up out of the river and tracked right into the wall. There were markings on the floor that suggested movement of large objects toward that wall and onward, but to where?

  The “doorway” itself was covered with wild ellipses and circles and fractal patterns that looked like somebody on a cocktail mixture of alcohol, pain meds, acid, and immunoboost went apeshit with a spirograph. Scattered about the wild curves were little insect-like drawings about the size of ping pong balls. The curves twisted about each other, and there were several star systems drawn about and along them as well. Every location where there was a drawing of one of the insect things, there was a star system. If Jawbone didn’t know better she’d swear the drawings looked like the energy curves that mecha pilots trace in their mindview to engage with enemy craft during dogfights. But the things seemed to look like they were on planetary scales rather than dogfight scales. The damned thing was perplexing to say the least.

  Several of the Juggernauts bounced about the feet of the bot mode mecha and were looking about the wall for handholds, buttons, secret levers, even magic words, but nobody was having any luck. So, they had decided to use a more direct approach—pound the shit out of it with mecha. After all, they had seven FM-12s and eight M3A18-T hovertanks at their disposal just sitting there collecting dust.

  “Alright, everybody stand back,” Strong said over her external speakers and the tac-net. As soon as the AEMs had cleared out she balled up her right mecha hand into a fist and drew it back. “Here goes nothing.”

  The giant armored fist pounded into the wall with the force of the largest battering ram ever built. Dust flew out from around the fist and the ground shook. The impact reverberated backwards through the hand and up the mecha’s arm. The entire bot mode mecha rang like a bell, jarring Delilah’s teeth and bones. She bit down against the bite block. She hit the same spot again, but this time harder. The cavern didn’t falter and the stone before her didn’t budge. There was no indentation in the granite. There was no crack. There wasn’t even a scratch on it.

  “What the fuck?” one of the AEMs said over the net. Delilah noted it was Master Gunnery Sergeant Howser. While she had met the AEM, she didn’t really know her. All she knew was that the Marine was very close to Deanna Moore and to CHENG Buckley.

  “Hit it again, Colonel,” Colonel Francis Jones, leader of the AEMs added.

  Delilah bit down hard on her bite block and tightened every muscle in her body to prepare for the reverberation, and then she let her entire mecha torso twist into the punch. The large mechanized fist slammed against the stone with such force that the thunderous crack of impact was nearly deafening. Delilah’s body was shaken to the bone and the mecha rang even louder than the previous times.

  “Warning! Structural Integrity Field collapse imminent! Warning! Structural Integrity Field collapse imminent!” The Bitchin’ Betty chimed.

  A flicker of blue light washed across the wall and then reduced itself to a circle only slightly larger than the mecha’s fist and directly over the spot that Delilah had just hit. The blue light rippled from the outer circumference to a single point in the middle and then it flashed again. This time light seemed to rush from within the circle and jumped off the wall with a burst of white light, tossing the many-ton mass of the mecha like a rag doll across the cavern floor.

  The mecha skittered and tumbled with earsplitting screeches of metal against stone as Delilah fought against the controls. She did all she could to keep the mecha upright, but her efforts were to no avail. She tumbled over out of control and came careening down against the stone floor on her back, sprawled out like a tortoise upside down on its shell.

  “Holy shit!” Delilah shouted. She squinted her eyes and fought the urge to shake her head until her suit diagnostics said she had no broken bones. Her ears rang, her teeth ached, her body felt like ants were crawling on it, and she was in pain from head to toe. “Nobody, I repeat, NOBODY, hits that fucking wall.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” resounded from the other pilots, tankheads, and AEMs.

  “Major Miller, did your sensors get that?” Delilah asked as she picked herself up off the rock floor.

  “Uh, no, ma’am. Sensor systems replay shows that nothing happened other than you flying across the room and landing on your ass, uh, ma’am,” Popstar replied. “Colonel, if you don’t mind my saying so, this is some weird shit.”

  “Goddamned right it is,” Delilah said as she dragged her mecha back to its feet. She took a deep breath then pounded over to the spot where she’d previously been standing and zoomed her optical sensors in close on the spot she’d been hitting. “Not a fucking nanoscratch on this thing!”

  “My guess is it has some sort of structural integrity field and clearly a point barrier shield,” Colonel Slayer said. “I don’t even think a tank would scratch it.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to try it, Colonel. This wall has something behind it. Why else would it be protected like this?” Delilah added. It was the damnedest thing she’d ever seen.

  “Looks a lot like that underwater wall that we found back at Epsilon Ursae Majoris that Captain Penzington and DeathRay vanished through,” Howser said.

  “How so, Gunny?” Colonel Francis bounced beside the AEM standing beneath Delilah’s mecha.

  “Well, sirs, it was a solid wall to us. We could see it, but water was flowing through it. Captain Penzington, who wasn’t a captain then, figured out that it was some sort of oscillating SIF or some such damned thing. She said she’d seen Elle Ahmi use something like it before on Ares. I don’t know. She did say something about cloaking algorithms. Since then I’ve heard the CHENG call it a backdoor.”

  “And that right there is why you’re here with us, Gunny!” Major Sellis bounced beside her and pounded her on the back with his armored hand. “A backdoor is just what we’re looking for.”

  “Yes, sir, but . . .” Delilah noted the hesitation in the gunny’s voice, and she had already figured out what the “but” was about. So she interrupted.

  “But,” Delilah tilted her mecha head down toward them. “We don’t know how to open it and we don’t have Captain Penzington or the CHENG here with us. So, somebody else is going to have to be clever.”

  “Anyone here got a science background?” Delilah pulled up the personnel roster in her mindview. There were history majors, logisticians, and strategists. One of the team was even a grandmaster at chess, but none of them were scientists or engineers. They were all smart and well trained soldiers, but their careers had not led them to engineering or science. “We’ll just have to get on-the-job training, I guess.”

  Chapter 18

  February 19, 2407 AD

  U.S.S. Sienna Madira II

  Hyperspace, 10.5 Light Days from Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 6:06 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  Alexander’s mind raced with the events of the day as he walked down the corridor with his Chief of the Boat Chuck Sowles. Occasionally, they found themselves stepping aside as repair bots skittered by or to let repair crews through with equipment. The two men had made most of the rounds through the medical bay and triages where they talked to as many of the wounded as they could. The COB made a point to direct Alexander to every sailor, tankhead, groundpounder, and mecha jock there that wasn’t being operated on. That was part of the COB’s job and Alexander appreciated it.

  A few times during the process Alexander had caught his wife’s eye across the aft hangar bay triage but they didn’t have time to speak. Sehera had her hands full tending to wounded that didn’t require immediate care from a doctor. He loved his wife dearly and was moved by how selflessly and tirelessly she worked with the casualties. She had done the same for him on many different occasions and seeing her brought back those memories. Some of them were really
very bad but some of them were very good. His wife had a strong demeanor and a big heart, but she was also a force to be reckoned with that even gave the big bad Marine pause at times. This just happened to be one of those times.

  Alexander’s heart and soul were torn and he was both glad and sad at the same time. His heart was truly breaking because he simply had no idea what to say to Sehera at the moment and he was tormented by his decisions of the day, the loss of his people, and the fear of losing his daughter. He had only three hours and twenty one minutes earlier just given the order to leave their only little girl, his princess, on an alien planet in an alien-controlled star system, not knowing when he could get back to her. He prayed that Nancy Penzington came through for her. But with the overwhelming odds looming against the Fleet when he had jaunted out of the system, he was very concerned for his daughter’s life. He could think of nothing but blame for himself and wished he’d never let his daughter get into her current situation so far from his ability to come to the rescue.

  Alexander checked his casualty list update menu to see how many had come off the triage and surgery list and made the recovery list. Of the nearly three hundred listed as casualties all but four were on the recovery list. The other four were now moved to the killed in action list. While the names were faces he could recall, they were not people he knew well. But they were crew. They were his crew. And he’d led them to their deaths. Alexander’s stomach churned. Again he thought about his daughter and prayed he hadn’t led her to her doom. Somehow, he knew, this mission would have to mean something more than just casualties, but for now there was nothing else to show for it. The second wave had to come through. If not the second, he wasn’t sure how to muster up a third. But, again, somehow, he knew he had to. The direness of the situation reminded him of the thirty-some odd days he’d spent in his armor suit wounded and hiding out in the deserts of Mars so long ago. Back then vengeance drove him to stay alive and to keep pressing forward. Now, vengeance would help, but saving his little girl was plenty motivation.